Sad minion — last donation was 5 days ago. About $3500 to go.
A big Thank You! to
Bill Leonard,
Mariam Melikadze,
Russell Gartz,
and lots of other Critterfolk for their contributions!
include("/home/httpd/html/users/critters/lastdonor") ?>

Blog

Critter Notices

Critters is 23!

Yes, 23 years ago Critters was born. Wow! Thanks so much
to all of you, who've made it such a resounding success!

Critters no longer accepting European Union members :(

It's with a heavy heart that I have to announce Critters can no longer accept people in the European Union as members. This is a result of the "GDPR" privacy laws going into effect.
I'm a big fan of privacy, and applaud the general idea behind the GDPR, but the way it's implemented forces me to close the door to EU writers. [read more why...]

Books from Critters!

Check out Books by Critters for books by your fellow
Critterfolk, as well as my list of recommended books for writers.

The Sigil Trilogy

If you're looking for an amazing, WOW! science fiction story, check out
THE SIGIL TRILOGY.
This is — literally — one of the best science fiction novels I've ever read.

P&E Has a New Caretaker!

I'm very happy to announce that P&E has been handed off to a new caretaker! Check out the site for news and such. Hurrah!

Interviewed!

I'm being interviewed live on public radio for Critters 20th
birthday. For those who want to listen, it's on the 10am (Mountain time)
show on Thursday, 11/19/16, on Colorado Public Radio - www.cpr.org has
streaming on the site or it's 90.1 FM in the Denver area. [Interview is done,
you can listen on the site]

Free Web Sites

ReAnimus Acquires Advent!

ReAnimus Press is pleased to announce the acquisition of the legendary Advent
Publishers! Advent is now a subsidiary of ReAnimus Press, and we will
continue to publish Advent's titles under the Advent name. Advent was
founded in 1956 by Earl Kemp and others, and has published the likes
of James Blish, Hal Clement, Robert Heinlein, Damon Knight, E.E. "Doc"
Smith, and many others. Advent's high quality titles have won and been
finalists for several Hugo Awards, such as The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction and Fantasy and Heinlein's Children. Watch this space for ebook
and print editions of all of Advent's current titles!

Network speeding up

I'm switching the connection over to a new, shiny 10X faster network
because of all the load. There might be bits of downtime as your boxes
learn new addresses and things. Should be brief. Let me know of any
prolonged outages you see.

Preditors & Editors Changeover

With the very sad passing of Dave Kuzminski, who ran P&E, I've taken over the P&E duties. Lots of what I hope are improvements; check it out at
pred-ed.com.

Critters Server is Dying has been Replaced

See important details
here in my blog.Let me know
if you find anything that isn't working right. (Manuscripts are now available
for this week, FYI.)

Book Recommendation

Announcing ReAnimus Press

If you need help making ebooks from manuscripts or print copies—or finding great stuff to read—look no further! An ebook publisher
started by your very own Critter Captain. (And with a
12% Affiliate program.)
[More]

FEATURED BOOK

~~~

An Ebook Pricing Experiment

Over on the forums for
Demonoid, a bittorrent tracker site (with considerable pirated material),
there was a discussion thread entitled "Price Gouging" on ebooks.
Readers and ebook fans posted commonly aired thoughts about the high price
of ebooks as well as the annoying DRM (which publishers have generally
felt are needed to enforce the prices and prevent piracy).

I tend to agree with those thoughts — that ebook prices are awfully high, and DRM is extremely annoying — so I've been doing some experiments to explore the alternatives.

These experiments are in response to sentiments like these that readers posted there:

I honestly feel that publishers are trying to kill ebooks.

One of the fastest growing areas of entertainment right now is Ebooks, so the publishing response to that popularity is to raise prices, sometimes drastically.

I am all for supporting authors. I know how hard they work their butts off to first get published then to actually keep an audience. That's why normally I didn't have a problem spending $6.99 on an ebook. But there is no way in hell I am paying $9.99 for an ebook when the paperback is $9.99!!!

I think the sooner the authors actually go into working for themselves in the ebook market, the better

To which my response was:

I agree, not just with the quoted bit but also the rest of what everyone's said above. In fact it's why I signed onto Demonoid — to post ebooks of my work (I'm a professional science fiction author).

I'm actually doing it as part of an experiment, to see if it's feasible to connect directly with readers. I frequently hear from people they would pay a fair price for ebooks if they were given the opportunity, especially DRM-free ebooks, as opposed to being forced to pay gouging prices up front for DRM-locked books, which I hate too.

I know I've felt ripped off a few times buying an ebook or app that really didn't live up to the expectations the advertising had set for it, but dang it, you've already paid for it and there's no money back. In the survey I thus asked people several questions to get at feelings about fair prices based on whether an ebook is new or been around a while, whether a novel or shorter length, and paying up front vs. paying based on how much you liked it.

The idea behind the "Pay as you like it" was tipping in a restaurant. (In the US, anyway, where servers earn a sizable amount of their income based on tips, which are based on quality of the service they provide. I know this isn't as common outside the US, but it's the payment model we use, so you just mentally know there will be a tipping amount to add on, along with taxes. For average service the common standard is to tip around 15-20% of the bill, with 20-25% if you liked it, and maybe 10-15% if you thought the service was poor.)

The relevant aspects for this experiment being that established convention is (1) you essentially pay the server after service is provided, not beforehand (whereas you generally pay for a paper book before you've read it all) — you don't walk out without paying for your meal; and (2) you compensate them based on the level of their service — more than average if you really liked their service and less than average (but usually [i]something[/i]) if you didn't like their service, and you certainly pay for the food in any event (except in really rare cases where you complain how bad it was).

Thus the model for paying for food and service in restaurants seems like it might be a fit for paying for ebooks: Download it, read it, and pay a fair price, possibly even based on how much you liked it. But paying something even if you didn't like it but you did read to the end. (Well, with an upfront payment system you've paid even if you never read it, but that doesn't seem especially fair to me. So I figure if someone doesn't read it they shouldn't have to pay, but it only seems reasonable if they read to the end they should pay something. And of course authors do have bills to pay so we can't give everything away free; though I really don't hear that from readers, that it should all be free, so that isn't, or shouldn't be, an issue.) Authors, like restaurant servers, need to pay bills and earn money from their writing, thus many authors and publishers are concerned about having their work posted around by someone else where readers read it free, sort of like walking out of the restaurant without paying. Even in a library the library paid for the copy of the book they lend out. However, I hear readers usually saying they get it that authors need to be paid, and they're willing to pay, if there was a way, and the price wasn't exorbitant.

So — the survey suggested "Pay as you like it" pricing for novel-length ebooks of around $6 if it was ok, $9 if the reader liked it, and $3.50 if the reader wasn't feeling it. For short stories the pricing has come in at about $2 average, $1 if it disappointed, and $3 if was good. (And these are the prices I've posted as suggested "as you like it" payments in one ebook, and in the other I put in even lower prices.)

As one professional price-setting person pointed out to me, people will usually say less on a survey than they'll actually be willing to pay. Which is probably why publishers charge such gouging prices, as they know people will pay them. Grudgingly, of course, and with complaint, as this thread is about, but they know it probably maximizes their profit to charge more.

Well, I've always thought that it'd be nice to charge a price people thought was fair, rather than a gouging price. Hence, my experiment.

To test out the theory that people will pay after reading, for non-DRM'd ebooks, and pay an amount they feel comfortable with, I'm torrenting some of my ebooks. I've included links in them to a payment page so when the reader is done they can pay what they think was fair.

For ease of reading I posted the first as a PDF, and the second I did in PDF/EPUB/MOBI/LIT/HTML formats. What other formats would people want to see authors post in?

For ease of payment I put links in the books to both PayPal and AmazonPayments, plus for the second one I included a way to mail a check or cash, or even upload a scan of a check. If anyone has suggestions for making it easier to pay I'd love to hear them.

I'm really hoping this experiment is successful, and I'll be able to tell other authors "Hey, this works!" The downside would be if it fails, and there are lots of downloads but few or no payments, that would only, unfortunately, prove the publishers are maddeningly correct in their high pricing and insistence on DRM to force people to pay up front. I really hope to prove that isn't the only way, as I hate DRM, and, like I said, I agree with the sentiments of what everyone's posted in this thread. I'm very curious and optimistic to see how this works out.

Sorry for the length of this post, but I'm a bit passionate about not liking price gouging and DRM, and hoping I can show there's a viable alternative.

I just barely posted the torrents so I'll report back what I've found as the experiment goes on. And if anyone has ideas how to improve on the idea, I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please let me know, either here or via
http://aburt.com/contact.php
— thanks.

Thoughts?

DONATIONS

Sad minion — last donation was 5 days ago. About $3500 to go.
A big Thank You! to
Bill Leonard,
Mariam Melikadze,
Russell Gartz,
and lots of other Critterfolk for their contributions!
include("/home/httpd/html/users/critters/lastdonor") ?>